WickedEngine VS vk_mini_path_tracer

What about Wicked Engine?

- https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

Wicked Engine

Code base really small because it develop by solo developer with help from some volunteer contibutors. Support DirectX12 and Vulkan. There is editor for edit and save scene file but it's not finish yet so you have to mostly add features that you want by yourself beside rendering part. https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

I just ran across the Wicked Engine yesterday. It's C++, cross-platform, MIT licensed and works with both DX12 and Vulkan. I had missed it in numerous searches I had done previously, so raising it here as it seems to be easy to miss.

I'm not speaking out of my ass, either, I have very actively followed low-level development being done towards open-source engines such as Diligent and Wicked. I personally am a contributor to the latter engine, as well. It is baffling to me that independent developers don't support this platform.

If you want to make your own engine but you need modern advance graphic features out of box. I think Wicked Engine is a good choice. https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

I found a great PRNG in a shader https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_mini_path_tracer/blob/main/vk_mini_path_tracer/shaders/raytrace.comp.glsl

NVIDIA has a couple of options for you to start learning hardware ray tracing. This requires you to use either Vulkan or Direct 3D 12, of which both are modern (i.e. low low level) APIs. In my view, you would be well-advised to budget significant amounts of time just to re-learn the traditional rasterization pipeline in Vulkan before thinking about raytracing. It took me quite a while to get up to speed on command buffers and synchronization and all the other ilk that OpenGL (mostly) doesn't ever expose. That said my colleague Neil Bickford has put together a tutorial for Vulkan raytrace extensions that does not assume prior Vulkan experience: https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_mini_path_tracer